Re-thinking Blue

Despite the ocean’s predominant darkness, blue is increasingly universalised as a conflation of both the ocean and neo-liberal capital: blue humanities, blue economies, blue legalities. ‘Blue’ is the logic of mastery and simply inadequate for ocean justice. Blue renders the ocean fungible and ready for extraction.[1] It could be argued that the blue humanities is a new disciplinary frontier for exploitation by educational institutions. De Loughery writes, “the oceanic turn in capitalism and scholarship seems to fulfil a desire for a material and intellectual (blue) “spatial fix”.[2] Such efforts to capture the ocean through a blue frame reveal the extent […]

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Re-imagining the Ocean​

A fact that often circulates about the ocean is that they cover over 70 percent of the earth’s surface. Less known, and perhaps more significant to a multibeing ocean justice framework, is that, 99.5 percent of the habitable volume of life on earth is contained in the ocean. The ocean’s complex physical characteristics, such as their dynamic, sunless interior, sonic and magnetic architectures, and pressure and chemical exchanges add further to unknowability. Though constituting more than ninety percent of the Earth’s biosphere,[1] eighty percent of the ocean is beyond the reach of solar light. Marine biologist and aquanaut Sylvia Earle […]

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Deep Ocean Thinking

Thinking ecologically with the deep ocean and its long, slow-time relationalities requires placing time into our observations and responses. Material-temporal matters are profoundly consequential in these worlds. Some of the water at the bottom of the ocean hasn’t seen sunlight for a thousand years. The seafloor sediment is constituted by particles slowing falling from the surface over time periods beyond our human scale. Seabed manganese nodules form at the rate of about a millimetre every million years. They’re home to vulnerable micro sponge communities and offer important substrates for many others. The pace of being in these sunless realms is […]

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Oceanic and Juridical Imaginaries

Sophie Chao from More Than Human Matters recently asked me how I came to be interested in oceanic and juridical imaginaries and the kinds of methods and theories I deploy in researching these themes. The following excerpt is from the interview I did with Sophie, which is available on the More Than Human Matters website. Some years ago I did a Masters of International Law and one of the units in that course was the International Law of the Seas. It was a jam-packed maritime law bootcamp – the major conventions applicable to 71% of the earth’s surface were taught in less than a […]

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